Nashvile, Tenn. ? Ronnie Dunn and Kix Brooks veered down a “Red Dirt Road” two years ago and never looked back.

The duo’s new album, “Hillbilly Deluxe,” is a twangy rock ‘n’ roll record with some soulful ballads and rowdy honky-tonk thrown in – much closer in spirit and sound to “Red Dirt Road” than to the good-time party tunes of their early years.

“We kind of discovered a sound we really liked and felt we were at home with,” Dunn said recently from what he calls his “barn” – actually a rustic retreat where he does some of his recording.

“There was a time when we were literally instructed, or advised, to write good-time honky-tonk songs that somehow leave a positive note on the table, and we chased that for a long time.”

“We’re probably as guilty as anybody – you get so shocked at having success – of wanting to recreate some of that,” Brooks chimes in. “We probably chased our tails a little bit for a while. These last couple of efforts really put us back in the creative process.”

Brooks and Dunn

Individually or collectively, Brooks and Dunn wrote nine of the 13 tracks on “Hillbilly Deluxe.” Songs such as “My Heart’s Not a Hotel,” “One More Roll of the Dice,” “Her West Was Wilder” and “Just Another Neon Night,” echo the loose, rootsy rock they grew up with. Sheryl Crow and Vince Gill sing background on “Building Bridges,” a mid-tempo, radio-friendly song.

Thematically, a song like “Whiskey Do My Talkin,”‘ a dark rocker in which a guy draws his courage from a bottle, and “Believe,” a soulful affirmation of life after death, is a long way from the 1992 dance smash “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” or the 1996 chart topper “My Maria.”

But the new songs aren’t all heavy. The first single, “Play Something Country,” and “She Likes to Get Out of Town” are foot-stomping fun, and Dunn even raps on the title track: “Put on the smell good / Put on the Skynyrd / Head into town like / A NASCAR winner.”

The album is produced by Tony Brown, who’s worked with everyone from Steve Earle to Reba McEntire. It closes with the bluesy ballad “Again,” a Darrell Brown/Radney Foster-penned tune with a chorus that’s almost impossible not to hum.

Both men say the songs reflect the extremes of their rearing. Dunn, in particular, felt a strong tug in opposite directions. He describes his father as a hard drinker who dreamed of being a country singer and his mother as a Bible-quoting teetotaler.

“When I was growing up I gravitated from one extreme to the other,” says Dunn, whose father died in 1986, before his son’s music career took off. “I didn’t know a middle ground.”

But in 1990, Arista Records’ Tim DuBois urged Dunn to join forces with another struggling solo artist, and Brooks & Dunn was born. The move was genius; together the duo have scored 21 No. 1 hits and sold 27 million records.